Sunday, September 2, 2007

Except for indicating wrong answers, playing tic-tac-toe, and telling pirates where to dig for buried treasure, X seems to lack any convincing reason for its existence. I came to this conclusion after reading through the poems people produced in response to the challenge described in the previous post. (be sure to check out the complete list at Slouching Mom's place). While the end results were all fiendishly clever, I'm sure that everyone struggled to find a word beginning with X. There's a reason that children's ABC books inevitably have illustrations of xylophones or x-rays.

Fortunately, X is completely expendable. It would be easy enough to substitute Z in words like xenophobe and xanthous and CK everywhere else. In fact, now that I think about it, I don't really see why the alphabet needs both C and K, since the two letters make essentially the same sound.* Most Germanic languages get by just fine with K for the vast majority of words, while the Romance languages seem to manage by overwhelmingly using C. And I'm sure there are many other candidates for excision from the alphabet. Any suggestions for letters the world (or at least the English language) would be better off without?

*In words like "nice," where C sounds like S, it could be replaced by, well, S.

17 comments:

haha. I was thinking that we probably crashed the "words beginning with x" websites as we tried to complete the alphabet challenge.

One could probably argue that Q is unnecessary, as the sound could be recreated with Kw. But I rather like Q. It adds a certain respectability to words like Quick. (Kwik could never refer to anything more sophisticated than convenience stores or powdered cocoa.)

In Danish X is rare and W and Z are recent imports used nearly exclusively in words "borrowed" from English. One of the reasons the V and W sounds are so often confused by Danes when speaking English. But then they do have å, æ and ø instead.

What about if you pronounce nice like the french city Nice, or the biscuits?It sounds like Niece, getting rid of the c would require changing the i to an e, and how do you deal with niece?Ahhhhh too confusing, I like our way of spelling things though, it provides so many ways of writing what is essentially the same word.

I like the letter x too but I do think many words could be shortened. For example cough (cof) or night (nite)...and thousands more words that we add letters to that are silent. If we cleaned them out, we could really shorten things up a bit.

good grief, i'm away for a day and you start trying to dump letters of the alphabet!

you simply cannot get rid of x. one, it has a cool shape...x. not to mention...without 'x'charles manson would not have been able to 'x' himself out of society during his trial. (the x he carved with a razor between his eyes)Which his supporters then copied.And what would happen to tic-tac-toe? How would we know when cartoons charcters had died?

Well I knew what x would be in my silly poem before I started. I'd just seen the word in an article about new "New World" species of plants.

In any case, I'm much too much of a snob to want to simply English spelling. So very Ben Franklin and Noah Webster for you all - although the latter added 6 new phonetic sounds to the alphabet. He would have spelled phonetic as fonetic. Yuck.

Secksy? Secks? Eckstra? Hmm, makes the words look more Germanic. But one of the things we did in Dutch (also a Germanic language) is to adopt the Anglophone spelling of some words... like sexy, sex and extra. And you know why? Because it's easier!